Introduction
Entrepreneur creativity deepens upon and is influenced by organizational culture and relationships. Many organization theorists and psychologists focus attention on organizational culture, leadership, and group dynamics when speaking about entrepreneurship and creativity. Entrepreneurs are in the business of creating and managing cultures within institutions, and that groups are the site of the development, containment, or destruction of cultures. In this case, explicit culture refers to directly observable patterns of values of which members are aware. Explicit culture includes standards of right and wrong and typical norms of behavior and forms of technology. The analysis of organizational culture includes an exploration of the unconscious and intersubjective structures of organizational life. These issues create an opportunity for creative people to apply their unique knowledge and skills to the business environment.
Main body
Examining critical moments of organizational history contributes to this insight. However, if the change is desirable to organizational members, one requires a method of analysis and intervention that is based upon the willingness of members to assume personal responsibility for their actions. The availability, quantity, and quality of such objects differ from one organization to another, even though they may have similar tasks and occupational membership across organizational boundaries. The most important aspect of these artifacts is understanding their often deeply held meaning for organizational participants. Knowing their official or avowed purpose does not lead directly to knowing what they mean to organization members and the consequences of their interpretations (Burns, 2001).
In small companies, cooperation in the form of sharing information and tasks across professional boundaries becomes problematic as a result. For example, the observer of a public works organization comprising separate groups of accountants, engineers, and architects will find each professional group focusing on different aspects of the same project (Morris 2007). Task cooperation and communication among the groups will be difficult as each group will try to impose its distinct values and assumptions upon the others. Accountants, for example, cannot understand why engineers and architects do not drop what they are doing and respond faster to their budget requests. While fiscal responsibility may be foremost in the minds of the accountants, it is not for architects and engineers. Accountants, therefore, do not appreciate the frame of mind of practicing architects and engineers, and the latter do not recognize the different priorities and concerns of the former (Oden, 1997).
Opportunities and innovations are included by the culture reflected in artifacts, degrees of formality, socialization, rituals, myths, and governing values. The degree to which a leader’s personality influences organizational culture is to some extent based upon the organizational structure and procedures. Taller hierarchies with centralized authority produce inordinate positions of power at the top, which facilitate greater domination of subordinates and unilateral decision making. Consequently, these authoritarian structures require expansive personalities at the top and self-effacing ones at the bottom. If the hierarchic structure is considered a given, then we must consider how individual personality fits and then affects organizational positions. Organizational cultures are shaped by the leadership’s personality and unconscious expectations and demands (Morris 2007).
For entrepreneurs, the host culture may also define the social class and ethnic origins of employees joining the organization as well as the clients and customers it serves. In addition, the host culture represents the character of the political climate of an organization, the degree to which it is friendly or hostile. Leadership sensitivity to the nuances of host culture assures the continued openness of the organization as part of a larger social system. Coming to know the identity of organizations evokes the personal meaning, experience, and perception of organizational life in the minds of individual members. Gaining access to members’ organizational experience helps us better understand individual and collective motives that govern their behavior and enables us to distinguish otherwise similar organizations from one another. Organizational identity defines who we all are in a group and who (or what) we can be as members of groups (Clark et al 2006). This includes the network of repeated interpersonal strategies for coping with (defending against) interpersonal and organizational events that are stressful and perceived as threatening. Organizational identity may be found in the difficult to observe interactions within organizations. Discovering it involves finding out how people experience one another and observing how they handle themselves and others under stressful circumstances. It does not assume that people in organizations share the same organizational image. Nor does it assume a collective identity for organizational members. However, it does imply that organizational culture and strategies for managing internal and external affairs are the results of members’ personalities and experiences that shape organizational meanings and experiences (Kamalanabhan et al 2006).
Creativity cannot exist in isolation from culture, so organizational culture determines the main issues and factors of innovations and the application of creative ideas. Organizational creativity represents how workgroups orient themselves toward the organization and from which individuals acquire their sense of security and identity as members. Through the lenses of organizational identity, the organization theorists’ and administrative practitioners’ ways of thinking about and seizing hold of the subjective data they collect in the process of working in and investigating organizations. To understand organizational identity fully, we need to consider the psychological origins of the concept (Clark et al 2006).
Culture is a framework for successful innovations and a unique vision of reality typical for many entrepreneurs. They have unconscious expectations of his reality. These expectations may originate in his frustrated need for idealization during childhood, where his need to merge with greatness was unfulfilled. The painful disappointment is pushed out of conscious awareness, repressed until a significant adult relationship revives the desire to merge with someone of strength and calmness. The subordinate comes to admire his supervisor, perceiving the “superior” as superhuman and infallible. Inevitably, his idealized supervisor makes mistakes and exposes human imperfections (Clark et al 2006). This results in the subordinates feeling enraged and depressed. The subordinate’s desire to merge with greatness is once again frustrated. His rage and depression are linked to his experience as a child when he perceived the holding environment between parent and child as fragile and insecure. From the observer’s point of view, such reactions seem inappropriate to the present adult circumstances. However, they are legitimate, rooted in an experience that shapes perceptions and expectations of others’ roles at work. The individual enters the organization with personality in place and, therefore, carries unconscious demands to be made on others (Clark et al 2006).
Conclusion
In sum, culture has a great impact on entrepreneurs and their vision of reality and perception of opportunities. These are the elements of what psychoanalysts call the transference of emotions, and most clinicians believe the phenomenon is not exclusive to the analyst-patient relationship. Organizational hierarchy is the context in which the psychodynamics of transference are triggered at work.
References
Burns, P. (2001). Entrepreneurship and Small Business. Palgrave.
Clark, R., Lee, Dwight R. (2006). Freedom, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Progress, Journal of Entrepreneurship, pp. 1 – 17.
Kamalanabhan, T.J., Nair, K.R.G., Pandey, Anu. (2006). Evaluation of Entrepreneurial Risk-Taking using Magnitude of Loss Scale. Journal of Entrepreneurship, 15 (1), pp. 47-61.
Morris, M., Kuratko, D. F., Covin, J. G. (2007). Corporate Entrepreneurship & Innovation. South-Western College Pub; 2 edition.
Oden, H. W. (1997). Managing Corporate Culture, Innovation, and Intrapreneurship. Quorum Books.